Full of magic tricks, fond of parlor jokes,
collects fruit flies, “For the coroner,” he jests.
Kind-a guy shows up at a party in uniform
a-hard knocking down the door,
“We’ve had a noise complaint at this address.”
“Just kidding, no, but seriously…”
“Don’t drink and drive you bunch-a drunks.”

Such-a nice guy, he once donated a bag of mice
to the local college herpetarium and took the time
to wrap bullets with rubber bands around the necks
of each mouse like a portentous necklet tied,
“lest the rats and the finks and those pesky snakes
get any funky I-deers” and, yes, he would mispronounce
the word “ideas” as “I-deers” and describe DUI suspects
as “salubrious” and wrinkle his nose at week old carcasses
and complain about the sickly sweet “ordure”
and when the excited time came to chase down a fugitive
he would call for his shotgun and a half-dozen barking
“corpse sniffing tranimals on those spiked short leashes.”

Check this gag, his favorite gag,
he handmade his own gilded box inlaid with mirrors
and he would set the box in front of you
and walk behind you and whisper, “open to see
whom you really are inside, your wicked sin,
people are having oral sex, semen spitted on the floor,
feces rubbed on the wall, married men cheating
on their wives, married wives jerking on black peni,
huge ebony black peni, big, bulbous purple PENI,
thick as eggplants, filthy, totally against society,
totally against the Bible, you hate it, you hate that sin,
you hate it with a passion, you hate it…” and when
you opened the box you saw a warped reflection
of your own image in a smoked mirror inside,
with a distorted forehead, a cockeyed nose,
dark lips, a circus afro on your head.

THEN he would reach around you and flip the box
and whisper, “open to see your redeemer,
he who must watch while you sleep quiet and secure,
you, who hath wasteth your substance with riotous living,
you know not your provender, he, who must watch
hidden in the amber-grease lest you might slip
and fall and lay drowning in the cesspit
of your own ceruse and spit…” and when
you opened the box from the flipside you looked
into a regular mirror with Officer Ferguson
peering over your shoulder and leering back at ye.